The Only True Mother Goose Melodies
The editor of the new edition of Mother Goose's Melodies knows much more about the curious history of the Boston edition than I do. And the reader will not need, even in these lines of mine, any light on the curious question about Madam Vergoose, or her son-in-law Mr. Fleet, or the Contes de Ma Mere l'Oye, which are so carefully discussed in the preface. All this is admirably discussed also in Mr. William Whitmore's paper published in Albany in 1889, and reprinted in Boston in 1892. In that paper he reproduced in facsimile Isaiah Thomas's edition of Mother Goose published first in 1785. What I want to tell, is of Mother Goose in the nineteenth Century--the Mother Goose on which the old Boston line was brought up--a line now nearly forgotten. But there were days, Gentle Reader, when an excellent body of people in this little Town of Boston grew up all together loving and loved, brought up their children here, loving and loved, and amused those children from babyhood in their own way. The centre of the baby life of this race was Mother Goose's Melodies in the dear little quarto edition, of which a precise copy is in the reader's hands.
One or two quotations from pre-reformation documents will make clear the
customary phraseology in England during the Middle Ages. King John's
Ecclesiastical Charter of 1214 uses the terms "Church of England" and
"English Church." The Magna Charta of 1215 grants that the "Church of
England shall be free and have her rights intact, and her liberties
uninjured." The Articuli Cleri of 1316 speak of the "English Church."
The Second Statute of Provisors of 1390 uses the title "The Holy Church
of England." "The English Church" is the form used in the Act "De
Haeretico Comburendo" of 1401, as it is also in "the Remonstrance against
the Legatine Powers of Cardinal Beaufort" of 1428[1].
[Footnote 1: Documents in Gee & Hardy.]
These quotations will suffice to show the customary way of speaking of
the Church in England. If this customary way of speaking went on during
and after the Reformation the inference is that there had no change
taken place in the way of men's thinking about the Church; that they
were unconscious of having created a new or a different Church. We know
that the Protestant bodies on the Continent and the later Protestant
bodies in England did change their way of thinking about the Church from
that of their fathers and consequently their way of speaking of it. But
the formal documents of the Church of England show no change. "The
Answer of the Ordinaries" of 1532 appeals as authoritative to the
"determination of Scripture and Holy Church," and to the determination
of "Christ's Catholic Church." The "Conditional Restraint of Annates" of
The editor of the new edition of Mother Goose's Melodies knows much more about the curious history of the Boston edition than I do. And the reader will not need, even in these lines of mine, any light on the curious question about Madam Vergoose, or her son-in-law Mr. Fleet, or the Contes de Ma Mere l'Oye, which are so carefully discussed in the preface. All this is admirably discussed also in Mr. William Whitmore's paper published in Albany in 1889, and reprinted in Boston in 1892. In that paper he reproduced in facsimile Isaiah Thomas's edition of Mother Goose published first in 1785. What I want to tell, is of Mother Goose in the nineteenth Century--the Mother Goose on which the old Boston line was brought up--a line now nearly forgotten. But there were days, Gentle Reader, when an excellent body of people in this little Town of Boston grew up all together loving and loved, brought up their children here, loving and loved, and amused those children from babyhood in their own way. The centre of the baby life of this race was Mother Goose's Melodies in the dear little quarto edition, of which a precise copy is in the reader's hands.